At the right of the firefox tab bar is a V shaped down arrow that does show a drop down menu like vertical tabs. I think his problem is that it vanishes if you click any place.

There use to be an IE wrapper called MyIE2 (later Maxthon) this had a truly wildly insecure plugin system allowing (ehm) script kiddies to publish plugins that pretty much had full control over everything on the computer (with sensible api's!) with the exception of the developer forum. No plugins ran there :)

Before you could uses one of these you had to review the code, someone trustworthy had to review it or it had to come from a (kinda) trusted forum user.

The browser it self had mouse gestures for next tab previous tab, with and without closing it, back forwards etc but you could also highlight a bunch of text drag it 1 cm and drop it onto the page it self which would open all links in the selected text in background tabs.

Every day people had new nutty ideas and wrote some (often buggy) plugin to make it so (or someone would write it for them). Others would test and review it, give their opinion about what was bad and what was good about it.

For example, one plugin replaced the Google results with the first 10 results opened in tabs. You would swipe though them rapidly leaving some open closing the rest then dump the remaining result in some sub folder of your research project with the folder default name being the query. (middle click to open the folder in tabs)

I forgot most of the 100+ plugins I was using. At the time I made an attempt explaining some of the frankly cool shit among them on mozillazine. This was very much like explaining the soup. How it sounds is nothing like the taste. It is obvious that useful discoveries are inevitable if you make 20 adjustments to the ingredients every day and have a sizable number of people taste and comment on the soup.

I cant tell you which soup you are missing. The problem is that the kitchen isn't what it should be.

Firefox and chrome (like the app store and the play store) have this uselessly complex extension system, a stupid struggle for attention and a completely useless feedback system. Giving feedback doesn't feel like you are part of development, it doesn't add to your reputation as a developer. There is no feedback from respected developers. No one is turning your code upside down and publishing it further down the thread.

The difference is kinda disturbing.

To follow the example, we should refine vertical tabs and tab groups to the point where [even] you consider it interesting enough to try it and give feedback. If it is worthy of mockery you should mock it.

A different example: Take Shift+control+tab and Alt+left/right arrow.

If I remember correctly the "winning" approach at the time (besides mouse gestures) was to hold down the mouse button (left or right) then use the scroll wheel to go though tabs quickly. If you hold the mouse over the tab bar it would just scroll though the tabs, it didn't just scroll the tab bar[note]

The gestures I had set up: (hold down the right mouse button then) swipe down and to the left/right to close the current tab and move to the tab on the left/right OR swipe up and to the left/right to preserve the current tab.

Webpages that scroll sideways are so rare I also remapped left and right arrows to navigate tabs when my hands are on the keyboard. (unless an input area is focused)

It wasn't my idea, others told me to set it up like that.

Switching back to firefox with it's shift+ctrl+tab it was painfully obvious what a dumb choice that was. (Writing on HN that it was a dumb choice changes nothing) I have one window atm with youtube tabs, each has 4-6 leters of the title. They look like "(28) Y", "(27) S", etc it isn't even consistent, the tab all the way on the right is called "(27" It's just silly. Last time I used chrome it was even worse than that. Why are they trolling me? Show me one website where the menu is truncated to 3 letters? No one does this. If one did no one would click on it.

[note] what is the point of scrolling the tab bar rather than cycle though tabs if I cant tell the difference between tabs?